For example, this blog post features a book review of the horror novel The Ruins by Scott Smith, a book that I haven't read but which has a high enough profile to have been reviewed in the Times. So one would assume that this is on the quality end of the genre spectrum. People should love it, right?
No such luck, as the blog review fails to engage in the actual story or themes of the book and instead complains about the missed opportunity to do something really cool with man-eating plants and Mayans. He concludes:
The only acknowlegdement of the strangeness of this fact comes when one of the characters suggests that maybe it isn't a plant at all. But what else could it be? An alien? A weird Mayan god? No one speculates. Furthermore, no one considers bum-rushing the Mayans who are keeping them on this hill, even when it becomes gruesomely obvious that they will quickly die there unless they get off. No one considers suicide until it's way too late. And the end is such a stunning horror movie cliche that I'm surprised Smith found the fortitude to write it at all. Was he truly that unfamiliar with genre tropes (unlikely, I think), or was he so focused on the movie deal with his buddy Ben Stiller that he thought he'd save the screenwriters some time and just tack on Generic Ending A right at the outset?There are two problems with this.
The book starts out with promise, but devolves into a cartoonish morass of illogic and cliche a little less than halfway through.
One is the fanboy obsession with teh cool, the need to be able to imagine all situations as though they were action figures in a playset, avatars in a video game, in which the goal of any situation is to battle to the end and advance to the next level. Why not bum rush the Mayans? That's what we'd do if this was Halo. The purpose of a story, on the other hand, is to lock people in a situation and see how they fail to behave in the ways we would expect them to, or they would expect themselves to.
The second problem is the fanboy anxiety with regard to cliche; the fear that it has all been done and said before, because it has been done and said before (except for bloggers who are all tremendously original and gifted). The idea of a "genre cliche" is in itself redundant because all genres are cliched. You can't fix it by calling it a trope either. A trope is just a cliche dressed up for prom.
So to say that the ending is a "stunning horror movie cliche" is essentially meaningless. There is no information contained in that statement. We never learn what the cliche is, why it is unoriginal, why its worse than other similar cliches, or how the ending should have been different. The whole attack is designed to highlight the blogger's superiority to everyone reading the post as well as the poor published novelist.
Moreover, if it is the novelist's purpose to write a horror story, then he or she must make use of horror tropes and cliches, it is required that they do so, otherwise (by definition) it is not a horror story. In other words, at a very basic level, the purpose of a horror story is to be a horror story; genre is an end in itself. To say that someone ought to be more familiar with a vaguely defined list of genre tropes and then assiduously avoid them (except for the man-eating plants!) is just confusing.
There seems to be some unspoken assumption that each writer must re-invent the wheel, rework the cliches from the ground up, invert them, reverse them, make them familiar but not too familiar. But how would one do that without disappointing the audience? And who decides which cliches are cool and which aren't. Is there a Gawker for horror writers so we can keep track of what's Hot this week? Is there a Pitchfork for horror snobs?
I'm guessing that if the book is as bad as asserted it has nothing to do with the reasons mentioned in the review. Most stories fail for the same reasons: poorly drawn characters, lack of an empathetic main character, absence of an impact or obstacle character, no relationship story, incomplete plotting, etc.
But here's the Times reviewer:
One of the creepy pleasures of “The Ruins” is the way it combines genre clichés with the verisimilitude that is Smith’s great gift. Transylvanian law apparently requires every horror tale to have a “You vant to go to the castle of COUNT DRACULA?!” scene, complete with terrified driver, howling wolves and rearing horses. Smith’s version is characteristically convincing: the local truck driver who takes the six explorers to the end of the road warns Amy not to go, but grows disgusted when she insists and suddenly says: “Go, then. I tell you no good, but still you go. . . . Go, go, go.” He drives off, leaving her confused; the rest of the party doesn’t even know the conversation took place. Things then fall apart with appalling suddenness, but the characters’ brains keep on ticking like cheap clocks. It’s the contrast between the familiar and the unspeakable that makes this book so harrowing.In this reading the cliche is not only identified (Dracula) but contextualized and dramatized to show how it enriches the project, reveals character, and advances the psychological aspects of the story. The cliche connects the story to the tradition of the horror story while placing it in an unfamiliar and wholly new situation. It's not just good writing, but good reading. And reading well, making meaning out of the visual and textual fragments that make a story, is the most difficult art to master.
